Claire Kramsch
University of California, Berkeley
USA
Thursday, August 28
Third Places in Applied Linguistics
Abstract:
The concept of “third place” or “third culture”
(Kramsch 1993) has been conceptualized under various names in various
disciplines in the social sciences. This paper reviews the ways in
which thirdness has been theorized in applied linguistics and how it
has been used in the teaching of language, literacy and culture. It fi
rst takes stock of current structuralist and emergent
post-structuralist notions of thirdness: semiotic relationality and
‘third meaning’ (Peirce 1898/1955, Barthes 1977),
‘dialogism’ in philosophy and literary criticism (Bakhti n
1981), third ‘space of enunciation’ in cultural studies
(Bhabha 1994), ‘third culture’ in foreign language
education (Kramsch 1993) and the notion of ‘thirding’ in
literacy pedagogy (Gutierrez et al. 1999, Kostogriz 2002). The paper
then reviews current attempts to capture the language/culture relation
in cross-cultural communication studies, sociocultural theory and
intercultural learning research. It takes note of a persistent
structuralist perspective that retains the polarity Self /Other despite
attempts to reach a third place that would be neither the culture of
origin nor the target culture. It discusses some of the thorny issues
facing structuralist research in times of globalization. Globalization,
that has been defined by Pennycook (2007:25) as “a compression of
time and space, an intensifycation of social economic, cultural and
political relations, [and] a series of global linkages that render
events in one location of potential and immediate importance in other,
quite distant locations”, presents a challenge to structuralist
theories of third place. How are we to analyze the data of linguistic
and cultural practices in decentered, multi dimensional contexts of
communicate on? And what kind of culture should we teach when we teach
language: the historical culture of an ethnic or national community?
The communicative culture of international exchanges? The hybrid
culture of transcultural flows? And on what grounds can language users
hope to achieve mutual understanding? The paper introduces the
post-structuralist notion of symbolic competence (Kramsch 2006, Kramsch
& Whiteside 2008) – a crucial dimension of both communicative
and intercultural competence – that makes thirdness the
prerequisite for interhuman understanding. With its emphasis on the
subjective, historical, stylistic and performative dimensions of
meaning-making, symbolic competence becomes the very manifestation of
thirdness in applied linguistics. Thirdness in turn becomes the
principle of viable scientific inquiry and sound pedagogic practice.
See recording of the keynote